We always wonder about our ancestors, and some of us turn to archaeology to try to figure out our descent. What do you do if you find your ancestors? And their ancestors? And their ancestors?
Doctor Safa Bint Nur pushed through the tall stalks. She felt far removed from her usual places of study. As a xenoarchaeologist, she mostly spent her time going over the records of the archaeologists of other races, or talking with them if they were accessible. The ancient Garrison were her specialty, and when the new site had been discovered by workers expanding the Garrison colony city on the aptly named Pink World, she was the closest expert, and so had made the journey here, first by ship, then by plane, and now, by foot, pushing the spongey, pink stalks of tall fungi out of her way, as she made her way through the dense jungle.
Behind her, Frank, a Garrison who had been assigned to assist her, followed closely, his lumbering gait seeming slow, but his long limbs making up the difference.
“How is it,” Safa asked, “that you have a colony here with 2 million citizens, and the closest archaeologist you could find to inspect this site was two systems away?” She heard her words being repeated in the Garrison’s language by the computer in her environmental suit, then waited for her companion to process her words, and formulate a response, as was customary for his culture.
Most humans saw the Garrison as a monolith. It was only natural, of course. People tend to lump things together that they don’t understand, and the culture of an alien race is just about as difficult to understand as it gets. Frank was from a Garrison tribe whose name loosely translated as “Those Who Range”, essentially an explorer tribe. Within that tribe he was in the tradesman caste, which were responsible for skilled tasks within the tribe. Frank’s family were trackers and wilderness tamers. He was a land ranger from a tribe of space rangers, and his name, in his own language, reflected that. Of course, Frank was all she would ever be able to call him, just has he would never really know her name. The languages were simply too dissimilar in sound.
“Yes, Doctor Safa,” he said, by way of her suit translator, “As you know, there are no archaeologists among Those Who Range.”
“I do know that,” she said, “but this colony has been here for nearly a hundred years now. Are there no members of Those Who Understand in the colony?”
Safa had picked up Frank when she arrived in Pink World City two days before. She had tried several times to engage him in small talk. Even after all these years, she had trouble reading Garrison expressions, though she was better than most of her race. Humans tended to look to faces for expression, but with their hard exoskeletons, the Garrison had limited facial mobility, which made them seem unexpressive. Learning to interpret their body language, especially the way they added meaning with their arm positions, had been challenging, especially since the Garrison themselves have trouble explaining it.
“Only in the University,” he finally replied, “but none in your field.”
“Do you think it might be a fragment of the original colony ship? Maybe an old, abandoned base from some splinter group of the original arrivals?”
Archaeology was a new practice among the Garrison, and was focused mostly on their homeworld. The Garrison didn’t even have a word for archaeology before their first contact with Humans two centuries before, the importance of history and understanding those who came before was an imported concept.
“No, my brother who found it did not recognize it.”
“Didn’t recognize it?” she turned to look at him in the stalks behind her. “The colony has only been here a century. Any ruins out here should still be familiar construction.”
The Garrison had established a foothold on this world during the short Human-Garrison War. It was to serve as a forward base in the conflict, but the conflict was resolved before it was needed. The civilian colonists didn’t arrive until decades later, but even if the site were from the original military occupation, Garrison architecture and design had not changed so much in two centuries that a Ranger like Frank’s brother would not have even recognized it.
“That’s why we called you, Doctor Safa.” his body language indicated patient tolerance, she thought. Perhaps he felt she was being dense. She turned back and pushed on. Mere meters ahead, she stopped again.
“Is this it?” she asked.
Ahead was a rectangular metal plate, hinged on one side and secured into a boxy, concrete edifice. It was somewhat squat, and too small to be any sort of residence or even a toolshed for a Garrison. The top of the structure only came to her shoulders. If the metal plate was a door, it was not meant for Human or Garrison bodies. Also, the architecture was all wrong. The Garrison tended to build rounded structures, and almost always preferred brick or metal plating over concrete. There were no flourishes around the doorframe. It looked more like something that would be from Earth’s brutalist tradition than like anything that should be on Pink World.
“Yes.” Frank said simply.
Safa pulled her machete from her belt and began to tear and hack away at some of the fungi stalks around the structure, ignoring the spores that stuck to her suit. Frank lifted a mask from within his tunic so as not to breathe in too much of the stuff. The structure was small, and opposite the door, it sloped gently toward the ground. “I can’t tell at a glance exactly what kind of concrete this is,” she mused, “so it’s hard to judge just how long it’s been here, but I think this structure predated Garrison occupation of the planet.” This was a profound statement, and she knew it.
She ran her hand along the slope, feeling the pits and jags in the surface. Why would it be shaped like this unless… It’s the entrance to an underground chamber of some kind. This structure is just the door to the stairs! But… stairs to what?
“Is that significant?” asked Frank.
“Are you serious?” she asked without thinking. “This might be the most significant discovery of my career!” she realized it was true only as she said the words. “This is evidence that sentient life was present on Pink World before the Garrison landed. It might be evidence of a yet undiscovered race of people, or a branch of an existing race which was once lost. Who knows what treasures of science and discovery lay within?”
He looked at her for a long moment. Of course, it was not so important to him. He was an explorer, and in Garrison culture, explorers serve one purpose: finding new wild places to be tamed. Those Who Range pride themselves on locating planets and spots of wilderness which are unspoiled, and preparing them to be brought under the protection and control of the other Garrison tribes. It was their tribe who pushed the Garrison into the stars millennia ago, when the frontier of their homeworld was at an end. It was they who made first contact with Humans two centuries ago, then quickly turned the proceedings over to Those Who Speak For Us, the Garrison leadership tribe, and it was Those Who Range who continued to push the boundaries of exploration, not just for the Garrison, but for all sentient peoples. They cared about the frontier, they cared about the future, but by social custom and by breeding, they cared not one whiff for the past. The past was a place inhabited by the other tribes, especially by Those Who Know, but never by Those Who Range.
“Should we open it?” Frank asked.
Safa’s eyes went wide. Open it? No, they should not open it. They should document it; they should study it. They should call in a team of archeologists and dig-site robots to thoroughly document and understand this part of the structure before they do anything else. There were tools they could use to map out the underground portions without ever touching the door.
She should be running back to Pink World City to send out calls to the Xenoarchaeological Institute at Mars University.
There would be discussions, though. Scientists and diplomats would have to decide who owned the site, who would be responsible for the findings, how The Sol Council and Those Who Speak for Us would share. It would take years, maybe decades before anyone got a look inside, before she ever got a look inside, if she even retained control of the site…
There were a lot of things she should be doing, but she wasn’t doing any of them, she was standing in front of Frank, thinking furiously. Taking a long time to choose her next words, just the way he would.
“Yes.” She said, finally. “Will you help?”
In an almost rudely short amount of time, Frank gave an approximation of a nod, a distinctly human gesture, and one that was difficult for Garrison to replicate. Perhaps he was more interested than she’d given him credit for, and he had no reason to care about what the other scientists and diplomats thought.
She turned away from him and contemplated the door. There was no obvious handle or other opening mechanism. There was a place where there may have, at one point, been some electronics installed in the concrete frame, but whatever had been there had long since turned to dust. Tentatively, as if breaking a sacred taboo, she reached out and pushed gently on the plate with one hand. The door didn’t budge.
Suddenly, Frank was over her shoulder, one of his long arms was next to hers, a sharp-clawed hand resting next to hers on the door. Then, before she could warn him off, it swung in. The door slipped away from her hand on its hinges; it was strangely silent as it smoothly opened. She stood agape, with Frank still over her shoulder, the smooth plates of his arm just next to her face.
She could just barely see that she was right, it was a tunnel into an underground structure, but she was wrong about the stairs, the floor of the passage was smooth. The same material as the outside of the structure, but unworn, unweathered by the centuries in the mushroom jungle.
Then the silence, and the spell, was broken. The upper hinge of the door snapped with a loud crack, and the door itself leaned then broke completely away. It clattered to the floor of the passage and slid down the ramp into the darkness. After several seconds, a crashing sound told them that it had finally stopped.
Safa stepped back, closed her eyes, and scrunched her face, cringing while waiting for the echoes of the sound to die away. Even after the sound stopped, she stood with her eyes closed for a long time, rejecting the reality of what had just happened. This was a mistake, they needed to let the Xenoarchaeological community know about this place. She could not just decide to go exploring, and this was exactly why. She might have just destroyed some irreplaceable artifact or record in her carelessness.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Frank already halfway through the small door. He had to crawl, and it was a tight fit, but it was clearly a bit larger in the passage beyond.
“No, wait.” She said. “We really shouldn’t go in there. We need to tell people about it first. It’s not our ruin to explore.”
Frank stopped crawling. She could only see the back half of him sticking out from the shaft, but she could tell he was considering her words. “We will be more careful with any other doors.” He said and continued to crawl inside.
The inside was immaculate, but small. She knew she shouldn’t be disappointed. The importance of the find was impossible to even put into words, but perhaps because of that, she had expected a vast network of tunnels and vaults, a site to match the size of its importance, but it was a single small room at the bottom of the slope.
The room was not crowded. A bank of lights lined one wall, obviously electronic controls, and readouts, surprisingly still coursing with electric life. In front of the blinking lights, a small figure sat slumped in a chair of familiar design, though she could not recall immediately where she had seen it before.
Frank ponderously walked around the chair to see the figure, while Safa stood still, taking in the scene. “A Hewn…” he said musingly. “Not what I expected.”
“A Hewn?” she said, incredulous. “That’s not possible, they never leave their homeworld, it’s in their programming.” The Hewn were a race of self-replicating machines with advanced sentient AI, considered one of the Peoples of the galaxy, but not really involved in society. They kept apart and never explored or ranged.
She stepped around also, bringing her lantern to that part of the room. Sure enough, the small figure was squat compared to a human, bipedal with four arms, the lower arms longer, with fewer phalanges. The head was distinctly triangular with a drooping mandible-like jaw. But this Hewn…
“Frank,” she said slowly, “This is a corpse.” He took on a look of pondering, as he looked back to the figure, but she didn’t wait for him to consider. She knew it was rude, but she continued. “A biological corpse! Not a machine body.” He looked confused then, and she controlled herself. Allowed him to formulate his next statement.
Finally, he said, “How is that possible?”
“The race that originally built The Hewn. They call them The Builders. We know that they built the Hewn in their image, but we know little else, no ruins or records or other sites have ever been found. This is monumental!”
They needed to get word to a preservation team immediately. The body was very well preserved, but as soon as they had opened the door up there, and broken the seal on this place, they started to destroy everything in here. They never should have opened the door…
“What happened to the Builders?” Frank asked.
“They died out,” Safa said, “We’re not sure why. They destroyed all records of themselves, all their sciences, all their cities, even the worlds they once occupied, they destroyed once they were done scouring themselves from them. The little we know about them is what The Hewn were programmed to remember, mostly only that they existed.”
She stared at the corpse in near disbelief. This was not just the most important discovery of her career. This might be the most important discovery of the last five centuries! But how was it here? There was nothing else on this world. Those Who Range had explored and documented the world thoroughly. There were no cities, no ruins, no other bodies, everything was gone from the planet except this one room, as if… Oh!
She turned to Frank, eyes-wide, unable to even think the conclusion of her train of thought. Frank had gotten there also. “Which of these buttons,” he asked,” do you think will destroy the world?”
END
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